Bone on MUD

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From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 09:01:29 PDT


> IRC was, at its best, a pure shot of peoples words real time.

BTW, Tiny* and friends were purely soc, albeit with some "situation" or "context." Never did LPs and the
game-oriented stuff myself. Tiny* was like IRC with objects, descriptions, behaviors, etc: purely about the
interaction, but a somewhat richer environment to do it in.

Tiny* mostly dying off was an evolutionary thing, though; clearly for most people, there wasn't enough added
value over IRC once it appeared to justify having all that complexity and low-tech VR *just* to enable chat.
So the original soc groups largely moved off to IRC, where as the game players continued onward with LP,
Aber, diku, etc.

Thinking about it, it's probably weird to hear somebody talking about Tiny "dying off" when clearly there are
more Tiny-derived servers up and running *today* than existed total in the first several years of MUDdom.
Early on, Tiny* was a serial thing: one MUD existed at a time, more or less, and most of the whole world
community --- all 2-to-few hundred of us --- would hang out primarily on one server. When one was
administratively scuttled, another would come up: TinyMUD gave way to TinyHELL then Islandia, Chaos,
DeepSeas, etc. etc. The flurry of really deep deep building pretty much was dead at about the DeepSeas
point; people just hated pouring all that soul into something that was inevitably going away in 6 months. At
that point, Tiny became chat, and most of those folks just sort of dissolved away to different venues, IRC
being one.

Kinda like when a really cool nightclub with a really tight core constituency closes.

Sigh.

Miss those guys.

jb


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